In recent years, with the provision of various services, computer systems have taken a large role in society, and such systems have been large-scale and complicated. Furthermore, it is very difficult to manually manage such a complicated system, and thus, there is no end to system failures caused by operations in the operations management. For example, there is a report that 75% of system downtime is caused by manual operations (refer to “A. Brown, “A Recovery-Oriented Approach to Dependable Services: Repairing Past Errors with System-Wide Undo”, UC Berkeley Computer Science Division Technical Report, 2003”). Therefore, for the purpose of decreasing such operational errors, there has been adopted an approach in which a system management procedure made by combining operations for performing operations management is previously defined in the system, so that the operations management is performed in accordance with this system management procedure.
A configuration of the computer system is frequently modified in order to enhance resources or security. Therefore, the system management procedure defined in the system needs to be revised so as to be consistent with the modification of the system configuration. Otherwise, the operations are performed in accordance with the unrevised system management procedure, and as a result, there is a possibility that failures will occur due to inconsistency with an actual status of the system. In order that a manager can easily revise the system management procedure so as to be consistent with the modification of the system configuration, there has been proposed a technology for providing information indicating the cause of the influence and the degree thereof (refer to “Japanese Laid-open (Kokai) Patent Application Publication No. 2007-87232”), in the case in which the system management procedure exerts some influence due to modification of the system configuration.
However, even if the information indicating the cause of the influence and degree thereof due to the modification of the system configuration on the system management procedure is provided to the manager, in practice, the manager who referred to the information may not properly revise the system management procedure. That is, due to system complexity in recent years, if a certain constituent element in the system is modified, an influence due to this modification of the system management procedure may be widely exerted not only on the modified constituent element but also on the remaining constituent elements. On the other hand, individual constituent elements themselves in the system, for example, a database server, a network and the like, become complicated using high technology. Therefore, it is required for a domain expert who is the manager of each of these constituent elements to have a high degree of knowledge specific to the expert's assigned domain. However, a manager tends to have little knowledge in domains except for the manager's assigned domain. In such a situation, even if the manager refers to the information indicating the cause and the like of the influence on the system management procedure due to the modification of the system configuration, it is difficult for the manager to judge correctly how the system management procedures are to be revised in cases in which such an influence is exerted on system management procedures of the remaining constituent elements in the domains other than the manager's assigned domain.
Furthermore, since the system is complicated as described above, there is also a possibility that, as a result of the system management procedure being revised to execute new operations, further remaining constituent elements are affected. However, the manager has little knowledge relating to the constituent elements in the domains except for the manager's assigned domain, and therefore, it is difficult for the manager to revise the system management procedure while correctly predicting such a possibility.
Thus, it was difficult for a manager to properly revise the system management procedure so as to be consistent with the actual status of the system. Therefore, it was difficult to prevent a failure which may occur when the operations are executed in accordance with the system management procedure. Furthermore, also in the case in which the failure practically occurred, it was also difficult for the manager to properly revise the system management procedure. In fact, it has been reported that most failures had already occurred in the past (refer to Mark Brodie, et al., “Quickly Finding Known Software Problems via Automated Symptom Matching”, Proc. of ICAC' 05, 2005). This is because experiences obtained from the failures occurred in the past are not properly reflected in the operations management.